If you can't see your workforce, you'll keep hiring for it

 

Organisations can't deploy, develop, or redeploy talent they can't see. Yet that is the reality for many companies today. One of the starkest findings from this year's CHRO research is that only 33% of CHROs say they have a clear picture of the skills their workforce currently possesses and will need in the future. Everything downstream of that, redeployment, reskilling, confident hiring decisions, depends on visibility many organisations don't have.

 

Key takeaways

• Only 33% of CHROs have a clear picture of current and future workforce skills; just 37% use skills data to make workforce decisions.
• Only 29% say they're very effective at tracking internal mobility and career progression.
• 50% are increasing contingent and flexible workforce capacity, and 31% say they primarily fill skill gaps through external hiring signals that internal visibility isn't yet trusted enough to lean on.
• A lack of reliable IT systems or workforce planning data ranks among CHROs' top three barriers to improving people strategy.

 

  

Leaders are making workforce decisions with limited skills visibility

Skills visibility should be the foundation everything else in workforce planning sits on. Right now, among CHROs and business leaders, fewer than half report having the capabilities needed to make skills-based workforce planning a reality.

Workforce skills visibility remains a challenge across the C-suite

The Adecco Group, 2026 Business Leaders Research, Q22: To what extent do you agree with the following statements about job redesign within your company?; Q17: To what extent do you agree with the following statements about your company's people and talent strategy?

The gap is often framed as a technology issue, but the reality is more complex. Better workforce intelligence requires employee trust, manager participation, and confidence in future workforce planning. Better workforce intelligence requires employees to share skills, managers to support internal movement, and leaders to invest in future workforce planning.

How organisations are making internal mobility opportunities more visible

Maura Quinn, Vice President of Early Talent Acquisition at Liberty Mutual, argues that mobility doesn't happen automatically. While employees should take ownership of their careers, organisations must create clear pathways and support systems that make those moves possible.

Liberty Mutual invests in personalised career guidance, mentoring, employee resource groups, and an internal career hub that recommends opportunities based on employees' skills and experiences. Programs such as Discovery Days help employees explore roles across functions and uncover career paths they may not have otherwise considered.

"Someone who starts their career in Claims that might sit in a field office may not know how to transition to a role in campus recruiting or university relations. Because of these Discovery Days, they now know what else is available to them. And the Hub allows you to discover roles that are aligned with your experience and skills," said Quinn.

Employees can’t pursue opportunities they can’t see. When organisations make skills, career paths, and adjacent roles more visible, internal mobility becomes far more realistic.

Most organisations haven't built the infrastructure to support internal mobility

Internal mobility emerged as one of the weakest capability areas across the CHRO survey:

• Only 29% say they are very effective at tracking internal mobility and career progression opportunities
• Only 34% are very effective at using workforce data to inform workforce-planning decisions
• Only 31% say they will redeploy employees internally if AI impacts their jobs

As AI reshapes roles and responsibilities across the organisation, nearly 7 in 10 companies do not view internal redeployment as their primary response. This is rarely because employees lack transferable skills or growth potential. More often, organisations lack the systems, processes, and visibility needed to identify adjacent opportunities and move talent with confidence.

The result is a disconnect between employee expectations and organisational capability.

Today's workforce increasingly expects growth, learning, and career mobility as part of the employment experience, for both attraction and retention. Yet many organisations are still asking employees to navigate mobility on their own.

External hiring works best when it's selective, not reactive

Many organisations rely on external hiring to address emerging skill needs. 2026 data shows 50% are increasing contingent and flexible workforce capacity, while 31% primarily fill skill gaps through external hiring, while simultaneously developing existing employees.

Rather than using hiring as the default response to talent shortages, organisations are striving for more selective application to complement a deliberate internal talent strategy.

As Kevin Bohan, CHRO at ProDriven Global Brands explains, the starting point is identifying which capabilities are core to the organisation's competitive advantage. Those capabilities are developed internally through coaching, development opportunities, and intentional career growth. External hiring is reserved for specialised or emerging skills that the organisation does not yet possess at scale.

"We're going to build and develop ourselves internally," says Bohan. "Areas where maybe it's not our expertise, like AI, we would go outside, tactically bring that in to help accelerate some of those areas. But we're very specific on where we do that because we want to make sure we're building that ongoing talent machine."

This approach reflects a broader shift toward a skills-based workforce model. Rather than developing people for a predetermined role, organisations build capabilities that can be applied across multiple future opportunities. The goal is not to create a one-to-one pipeline for predefined jobs. It is to strengthen the organisation's internal bench so talent can move into new roles as business needs evolve.

Internal development builds long-term capability. External hiring fills targeted gaps.

As Bohan notes, the ultimate goal is to build a talent pipeline so strong that the organisation becomes a "talent exporter,” a sign that it is consistently developing capabilities that others want too.

What this means for CHROs

A lack of reliable IT systems or data for workforce planning ranks among CHROs' own top-three barriers to improving people strategy. And the solution is genuinely hard: skills visibility requires structured discovery mechanisms (like Liberty Mutual's Hub and Discovery Days), psychological safety for employees to self-identify skills without fear (the "target on your back" problem), and a forecasting discipline that goes beyond the 39% currently claiming to have one.

Until that visibility exists, external hiring and contract workers will keep functioning as the default, not because they're the better option, but because they're the only one that doesn't require seeing what's already inside the organisation.

Frequently asked questions

Why isn't internal mobility always the first choice for filling roles? Internal mobility and external hiring both play important roles in workforce strategy. Organisations often turn to external hiring when they need specialised expertise, new capabilities, or additional capacity. When only 33% of CHROs have a clear picture of current and future skills, and only 29% are very effective at tracking internal mobility, external hiring becomes a more legible option even when internal capability may exist.

What percentage of organisations would redeploy employees internally if AI changed their jobs? Only 31% of organisations say they would redeploy employees internally if AI impacted their roles. While most CHROs report that AI has not yet reduced workforce headcount (77%), and 44% say AI has expanded job opportunities, many organisations are still building the processes and visibility needed to confidently transition employees into new roles. With 39% anticipating AI-related headcount impacts within the next 12 months, strengthening internal mobility is becoming an increasingly important workforce priority.

What's the biggest barrier to better workforce planning? A lack of reliable IT systems or data ranks among CHROs' top three barriers to improving people strategy, alongside the complexity and speed of ongoing change.

Have questions about your workforce strategy?

Every organisation is navigating workforce planning and talent strategy differently. Contact us to discuss how these findings compare with your own workforce challenges.

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Next in this series

Execution challenge #4: Reskilling fails on accountability, not awareness, on why employees and employers each assume the other owns career development — and neither fully does.